Starfinder Roleplaying Game

Tactical Rules

Starfinder Core Rulebook, page 236

TACTICAL RULES

TACTICAL RULES

While many ordinary citizens of the Pact Worlds go their entire lives without seeing combat, adventurers and explorers often stumble into situations where a laser pistol or a chainsword is their best option, or they might find themselves fighting for their lives from the back of a vehicle. Combat and tactical play are common parts of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game, and the following chapter explains how these crucial and wide-spanning rules work.

From high-level descriptions of how tactical combat works in Starfinder and robust breakdowns of tactical actions to in-depth explanations of key tactical concepts and special abilities, this chapter contains everything you need to know about tactical play in Starfinder.

In this section

  • How Combat Works Combat in Starfinder is cyclical. After initial steps that begin a battle, every character acts in turn through a regular cycle of rounds until the combat ends.
  • Combat Basics This section presents the key terms and calculations needed to adjudicate the most basic elements of combat: attacking and defending.
  • Actions in Combat The specific actions you can perform in combat are detailed in this section. For quick reference, specific combat actions are organized by their type in the Actions in Combat sidebar.
  • Injury and Death Your Hit Points (HP) measure how hard you are to kill. No matter how many Hit Points you lose, you aren’t hindered in any way until your Hit Points drop to 0.
  • Combat Modifiers Several factors can influence combat or grant you modifiers to attack rolls or other statistics.
  • Movement and Position It’s often very important to know where all the creatures involved in an encounter are, as well as what terrain and other objects are present.
  • Senses Just as actions determine what you can do in combat and movement determines how you get there to do it, senses determine what you can perceive and how.
  • Special Abilities A number of creatures and characters with a variety of classes gain the use of special abilities.
  • Bonuses And Penalties Throughout the course of her adventures, a character often comes under the effects of conditions, circumstances, magic, technology, or other factors that provide her with bonuses or penalties to certain game statistics…
  • Defining Effects Whether an effect is created by a class feature, spell, or piece of equipment, it usually has factors such as area, duration, and range that are defined using specific game terms, as well as descriptors that indicate…
  • Conditions Conditions are circumstances or states that can affect characters for an extended period of time. If more than one condition affects a character, apply them all. If effects can’t combine, apply the most severe effect.
  • Vehicle Tactical Rules When you’re in a vehicle fleeing from enemies who are on foot, or you’re on foot yourselves trying to stop a vehicle, movement and combat are represented on a grid, such as a battle map.
  • Vehicle Chases The tactical vehicle rules in the previous section are meant for battles on a grid, with some creatures in vehicles and others on foot.